Category Blog

All Blog Posts

All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.

GE Gets a Lean CEO, From the Outside: Larry Culp

Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.

Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?

Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.

What We Learned from Touring Toyota’s San Antonio Plant

Last week was our first "Symposium on Learning Organizations" where we brought together 40 people with diverse backgrounds in manufacturing, healthcare, IT, government, and other industries or professions together to learn from each other in a "PowerPoint-free zone."

In this post, I'll share some photos and reflections on our tour of the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio (TMMTX). The visitor center has been completely revamped from my last visit, just as the one visitor center I saw in Japan back in March had been redone.

Karen Martin on Clarity First and Why Leaders Must Confront Ambiguity

My guest for Episode #319 is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. She was previously a guest on Episodes #151, #190, and #285.

Karen is an author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She is also a speaker and a consultant with a B.S. in Microbiology from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in Education from California State University, Bakersfield. Read her full bio.

What is clarity? How can we work toward creating less fog and more clarity in organizations? We'll talk about that, along with a bit of discussion about clarity in metrics, as I write about in my book Measures of Success.

Kaizen at Garrison Brothers: Improving the Bourbon Bottle Dipping Process

I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future.

I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before...

In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week.

When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me. 

Reviews of “Measures of Success” – I’m Appearing on “Quality Digest Live” Today

Today, I'll be appearing live as a guest on the live internet show "Quality Digest Live." You can watch live at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT on Friday...

QualityDigest.com also recently published a review of my book Measures of Success and we'll be discussing the book and more on the show.

I also recently discovered this short podcast episode / review about my book, from the "Improve Something Today" podcast by Brian Kerr...

Trending now

Toyota Main Gate and Toyota Durban Manufacturing Plant sign at the Prospecton plant entrance
The Toyota Andon System in South Africa: Two Buttons Instead of a Cord
Medical professional in dark scrubs stands in a brightly lit hospital corridor, looking toward the distance.
When “I Have a Pulse” Gets Dismissed: A Toddler Found Alive in a Hospital Morgue
Illustration of a worker inspecting a cracked gear with a magnifying glass on a workbench in a factory, with a cassette tape and tool cart nearby
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: October 23, 2026
Joel Tosi and Elisabeth Hendrickson stand against a light blue radial background, one holding a megaphone and the other presenting on a podium
Signals & Levers: Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi on Change Theater, Open Loops, and Systems Thinking for Software Teams